Hello! I’m a woman, and I feel like this week has put me through the spin cycle and launched me into some strange fourth dimension. Since last Friday (yes, that was just a week ago), when the news broke that Donald Trump had bragged about sexual assault on tape, each day has brought forth a new wave of speeches, un-endorsements, condemnations, more leaked info, and most troublingly, stories from women who claim to be his victims. Today, in an effort to take back a bit of the conversation, the Trump campaign sent an email asking female supporters to include #womenwhovotetrump in their tweets. At the moment of writing, it’s been used 110,000 times by women enthusiastically explaining their allegiance.
The #womenwhovotetrump surely aren’t homogeneous. They aren’t all Hillary-haters or conspiracy theorists or anti-immigration nuts prepping bricks and mortar for a wall—just like all Clinton supporters aren’t partial-birth-abortion-promitng, feminazi, bleeding heart liberals who want to turn our country into Denmark. But at the end of a week like this one, the lines between the two groups of women are pressing deeper and deeper into the sand, and the very question of how women should feel about and treat #womenwhovotetrump is rising to the surface.
On the one hand, women who are voting for Trump haven’t been brainwashed. They have most likely had exposure to all the same information the rest of us have—and they’ve chosen to take that information and process it into support for this man. Perhaps their allegiance to policy viewpoints pulls so firmly at their political consciences that they’ve muffled all other sounds. Perhaps the din of Hillary’s past, no matter how exaggerated or fictitious, rings more loudly than the outcry over Trump’s.
At the same time, once many women have heard that Trump once made lewd comments about a 10-year-old girl, or took advantage of his position to spy on naked women at the Miss America Pageant, or forced himself on the woman in the plane seat next door, they don’t need to hear anything else. Those actions—hell, just one of them—cast enough of a shadow that it overrides an expansive definition of the right to bear arms or a desire for limited government. And for other women, whom we rely on as fellow soldiers in the daily fight for equality, to look past all that and see Trump as a leader feels like base treachery. It feels like #womenwhovotetrump just don’t care about other women.
Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/heres-what-i-think-we-should-do-about-womenwhovotetrump
No comments: